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Each semester, the Havighurst Center hosts the Havighurst Colloquia Series. This lecture series, which is attached to an undergraduate, cross-listed topics course focusing on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES), is comprised of invited guest speakers who lecture on some aspect of the topic being taught that particular semester.

Spring 2025 Havighurst Center Colloquia Series
The Holocaust: The Matter of Historical Violence
All lectures are open to the public

Organizer: Dr. Neringa Klumbyte, Professor of Anthropology
Mondays*, Upham Hall 364, 11:40am - 1:00pm

Plunder and theft were an intrinsic part of the Holocaust, a continent-wide affair, a theft of 6 million people. Jan Gross (2012, 121) famously argued that “[f]rom the river Dnieper to the Channel, from Paris to Corfu, no social stratum could resist the temptation.” Thus, the history of individual death of nearly every Jew in Eastern and Western Europe starts with theft in some way. From expropriation of Jewish businesses, private property, and artwork to collecting their home goods and clothes, or searching for gold and valuables in bodies, robbery and theft defined every stage of the Holocaust. The course explores plunder and dispossession during the Holocaust by focusing on territories of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. It will focus on material violence, its interrelation with murder, post-WWII social and political trajectories of things, and recent attempts to reconstitute historical justice.

Monday, February 24 (Zoom)
Magdalena Waligórska, Humboldt University Berlin
The Great Plunder of Small Things: Clothes Robbed from Holocaust
Victims and the Materiality of Violence

You must register in advance for this lecture:
 

*Wednesday, March 12
Dovile Budryte, Georgia Gwinnett College
Memorialization, Historical Justice, and Jewish Property in Lithuania

Monday, March 17 (Zoom)
Gintare Malinauskaite, Humboldt University in Berlin
Double Dispossession, Double Injustice: The Expropriation of Jewish
Property in Nazi-Occupied Lithuania and Its Aftermath

You must register in advance for this lecture:


Monday, March 31
Shir Kochavi, Israel Institute for Advanced Studies
Post 1989 Restitution Efforts of Nazi Looted Cultural Property:
East and West

Monday, April 7
Erica Lehrer, Concordia University
Material Legacies of Aid to Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland

*Wednesday, April 16
Doug Holmes, SUNY Binghamton
The Unthinkable: Inhabiting the Communicative Space of
Contemporary Fascism